Research

MRL brings together world-class faculty and students in condensed matter physics, materials chemistry, and materials science in a highly collaborative research environment.

The Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory (MRL) fosters interdisciplinary research at the forefront of materials science. MRL brings together world-class faculty and students in condensed matter physics, materials chemistry, and materials science in a highly collaborative research environment.

MRL is home to several large-scale, multi-investigator research programs. These research activities are supported by the Department of Energy's Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences and Engineering Division (DOE BES\DMS); Department of Defense (DOD) agencies and DARPA; the National Science Foundation (NSF); other federal agencies; industry; and the University of Illinois.

DOE BES\DMS Research Clusters

MRL is also home to two NSF-supported research centers: Materials Computation Center (MCC) and Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center (NSEC) for Directed Assembly of Nanostructures. The MCC is led by David Ceperley (PI); the NSEC is a partnership with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI, Lead Institution with Richard Siegel, PI) and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).

MCC is composed of a coordinated, interdisciplinary group of faculty throughout Engineering and Chemistry focused on the discipline of Computational Materials Science. As a field rapidly evolving and growing in importance, MCC finds it is critical to develop algorithms in conjunction with new theoretical developments, modern computer science approaches, and real experiments. To accomplish the long-term goals, there must be multidisciplinary education of future computational materials scientists, active networking of researchers and students with the world-wide community, creation of useful tools for research, and applications to challenging problems in materials research.

MCC will foster a stimulating intellectual and interactive environment and facilities for students, teachers and researchers focused on research and education in computational materials science.

The research focus of this NSEC is to discover and develop the means to assemble nanoscale building blocks with unique properties into functional structures under well-controlled, intentionally directed conditions. Our overall mission is to integrate research, education, and technology dissemination to serve as a national and international resource for fundamental knowledge and applications in directed assembly of nanostructures. Specifically, our research activities focus on polymer- and bio-nanocomposites.

Materials Research Laboratory

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 104 South Goodwin AveUrbana, IL 61801, USA